…Our Father… – Matthew 6:9

If God be my Father, He loves me. And oh, how He loves me! When God is a Husband He is the best of husbands. Widows, somehow or other, are always well cared for. When God is a Friend, He is the best of friends, and sticketh closer than a brother; and when He is a Father He is the best of fathers. O fathers! perhaps ye do not know how much ye love your children. When they are sick ye find it out, for ye stand by their couches and ye pity them, as their little frames are writhing in pain. Well, “like as a father pitieth his children, so the Lord pitieth them that fear Him.” Ye know how ye love your children too, when they grieve you by their sin; anger arises, and you are ready to chasten them, but no sooner is the tear in their eye, than your hand is heavy, and you feel that you had rather smite yourself than smite them; and every time you smite them you seem to cry, “Oh that I should have thus to afflict my child for his sin! Oh that I could suffer in his stead!” And God, even our Father, “doth not afflict willingly.” Is not that a sweet thing? He is, as it were, compelled to it; even the Eternal arm is not willing to do it; it is only His great love and deep wisdom that brings down the blow. …But, parents, although ye love your children much, and ye know it, ye do not know, and ye cannot tell how deep is the unfathomable abyss of the love of God to you. Go out at midnight and consider the heavens, the work of God’s fingers, the moon and the stars which He hath ordained; and I am sure you will say, “What is man, that Thou shouldst be mindful of him?” But, more than all, you will wonder, not at your loving Him, but that while He has all these treasures, He should set His heart upon so insignificant a creature as man. And the sonship that God has given us is not a mere name; there is all our Father’s great heart given to us in the moment when He claims us as His sons.~ C.H. Spurgeon

https://www.blueletterbible.org/Comm/spurgeon_charles/sermons/0213.cfm